ever wrote, and the last word of what can be said in praise of Byron. In that essay, in which he speaks of Byron having ‘the imperishable excellence and sincerity and strength,’ he was of the opinion that Byron wrote good verse. Personally I cannot think that the man who wrote the following lines:-- XXX ‘There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee, And mine were nothing, had I such to give; But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree, Which living waves where thou didst cease to live, And saw around me the wide field revive With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring Come forth her work of gladness to contrive, With all her reckless birds upon the wing, I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring,’ or in another manner (of the meeting of the Archangel and Lucifer)-- ‘And yet between his Darkness and his Brightness, There passed a mutual glance of great politeness,’ wrote bad verse. “And to me he will always be what he was to Goethe, to Shelley, and to Arthur Strong-- ‘A beautiful and mighty thing of Light.’ “The phrase is Byron’s.” MODERN LITERATURE IN RUSSIA At the beginning of last century there was in Russia, as in most other countries, a great wave of romanticism, which produced Pouskin, Lermontov, and other poets. The wave subsided, and no planets of great magnitude swam into the ken of the watchers of the skies of Russian literature until the period of the Crimean War. After the war and the liberation of the serfs there came another great movement, and a race of literary giants--Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Dostoievski--was born. It is a remarkable fact that the movements of literary renascence in Russia have always immediately followed movements of political renascence and change. This second movement subsided, and although the Russo-Turkish War gave a kind of flip to the country a general calm soon once more prevailed, which up till 1903 bore all the signs of stagnation. The writer who gives the most faithful picture of the general atmosphere of the period which preceded the Russo-Japanese War is Anton Tchekoff. In a multitude of short stories, some broadly humorous, others poignantly sad, and in half a dozen plays (in writing which he inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the stage and was the pioneer of a movement which at one moment made itself felt in London at the Court Theatre) he reflects the frame of mind of educated Russia during this period. It is a frame of mind of stagnation. Its prevailing characteristic is the hopelessness arising from the conviction that it is no use trying to do anything in Russia; that on those who would like to work for progress and enlightenment, education and liberalism in the larger non-political sense of the word, the doors are shut, and that therefore there is nothing to do but to play cards, drink vodka, and while away the tedious hours as best one can.